Posted by: iffygrace on: June 17, 2008
Some stuff I REALLY want to read.
The Lovely Bones
P.S. I Love You
Wuthering Heights (the library doesn’t stock this O_O)
Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf (I couldn’t find any of her books the last time I checked at the library T.T)
The Kite Runner
Well, and yes for those who enjoy reading books that make you cry, check out The Dogs of Babel. Recommended to me by my senior, it’s a really good book. Applauded for being “written with a quiet elegance and a profound knowledge of love’s hidden places”, (and by the way I love that entire phrase) the book is both a love story and a mystery novel all at once. I cried once after reading every page while halfway through the book. You can’t exactly blame me for wanting to read P.S. I Love You, can you?
Here’s a question for you to ponder. Is it right to have a few loves in a lifetime? Isn’t there something inherently wrong about pledging your heart to someone, only to love another person when the initial one is no longer there? Feel free to leave a comment.
Posted by: iffygrace on: May 26, 2008
My last post was really quite a once-off thing, except now some things have made me think about it again. I posted a question on another blogging website’s community recently and was hoping to receive some good food-for-thought replies, but most of the comments I got were either short and not very informative or sarcastic and dismissive of the validity of my question. Admittedly, the question could be viewed as rather ludicrous (do veggies feel pain?) but I meant it to be taken seriously. That disappointed me. Like how I mentioned reading about it in Feminist Philosophers, the human will has an unfortunate tendency to assert itself forcefully in discussions.
Another thing the post brought to my attention was how easily people begin cat-fights in a discussion. It might be the people themselves who contribute to it (I’d term this the environment for want of a better term), especially so in the community I was in. If I had started the discussion on wordpress, for instance, or a science journal (provided one could even start threads in both places), the response I’d have gotten would have been very different. For one, the replies would have had a lot more depth and supportive evidence, and two, people probably would not have been as easily angered.
One commentor posted a long reply about how she thought plants were intelligent beings and might feel pain or equivalent and that people who didn’t think so were narrow-minded, to paraphrase her words. I felt that the tone was okay, and strictly speaking I don’t think that she was really to be taken that seriously in what she said about narrow-mindedness. Her comment garnered a lot of criticism though. The post is more of an ego fight than a proper discussion now, which I realised sadly reflects society. People all too often find it so difficult to critique and so easy to critisise, and even easier to mock another person’s views. The perfect intellectual debate should not be about putting the other person down or manipulating emotions to earn a victory, but about listening to the other person. It’s pretty depressing to think that most people in the world are often too busy, to hurried, to caught up in their normal everyday stress to think about their actions for a while.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how tolerant are you? 1 being least and 10 the most tolerant. And why would you say that?
I think most people have a tolerance level of about 6. After a short while they break. Many are quick to judge, quick to set their views concerning a particular person or situation. I envy such people their deftness of thought and judgement, but it’s not always good. Conflicts often start because of a sudden wrong move. How often do you read the words “… sparked off a controversy” in the news? It is so easy to sway the crowd to your will, as long as you have the skill to do it.
Posted by: iffygrace on: May 25, 2008
Some very interesting points have been raised by some bloggers recently. I happened to stumble across them while reading up on plant nervous systems, of all things.
This article, for example, wonders whether analytical philosophy asks too many questions about the propositor than about the issue itself. A little like taking sides in an intellectual discussion.
Similarly, this article sparked off a series of thoughts by the author on how trends, as he terms it, affects the way philosophers and all participants in arguments in general moderate the tone of their argument to “pander to the audience”. I’m sure everyone’s thought about this at least once while writing up a paper for submission, or when your tutor asks you how you’re going to tone your survey so the surveyees don’t answer based on a biased question. The perfect survey, to quote my project work tutor, is extremely difficult to come up with and it takes a lot of skill to make sure all the questions are prefectly impartial.
How does your audience affect you? And how do scientists write the perfect logical journal article? No one report is truly free of all opinions. There are definitely opinions in the reasons for choosing to fix certain variables. So how does the perfect philosopher argue? Analytical philosophers need all the logic they need. But it is virtually impossible to get rid of all human intellectual and emotional reaction to certain things. Something that does not quite fit into your mode of thinking immediately starts you wondering why and how the other side is right, and how you can rebut. It is more difficult when you are arguing as a group, because then the herd instinct (something I stress quite often) kicks in and one, being human, has this natural tendency to try to protect this one value you all believe in. That herd instinct is dangerous, but we can’t rid the world of it. That would be akin to a dystopia where everyone lives only on logical thought. Logical thought alone won’t get you anywhere; part of the privilege of being human is being able to sense the grey areas such as good and bad.
So is it possible to ignore trends, as the writer in that article suggested the idea be called? I would say no. One commentor in the article suggested “philosophical system-building as an expression of the will to power, rather than a search for objective truth”. Quite possible, in my opinion. Philosophers are innately human, and humans innately have a pretty robust ego. Philosophical disscussions and your average argument with a friend usually tends to melt away into a sparring contest to see who dies first – in other words, who runs out of evidence to back oneself up first. At least that’s the case for my friends and I.
It’ll be a while yet before people can actually communicate without bringing any emotions(and I mean it, I’m not just talking about being unbiased, but also how you think a robot would probably handle the information) into their discussion, and I don’t believe that day will ever come.
By the way, some of you might want to check out what Pyrrhonian Skeptics are all about. That’s new to me too. (at least the name is if not what they do)
Posted by: iffygrace on: April 23, 2008
In a honest, to-the-point narration, Murakami Haruki spins a tale of love, philosophy, friendship and mystery. A masterful storyteller, one might say. That isn’t all, though. Murakami brings to life potentially boring characters: an old man who lost sophisticated thought functions in his youth and cannot read or write or process harder thoughts; a 15-year-old runaway. With unassuming effortlessness, he spins out the tale interconnecting these characters and brings out the weaknesses and strengths of each – the runaway Kafka’s (not his real name) courage in facing a faceless world and his inability to shake off a prophecy; Oshima’s interesting nature as a human – both biologically and mentally; Miss Saeki’s yearning for the past and wish to die in the present; Nakata’s simple-minded kindness and exploited innocence. Slowly, we get a hold on a wisp of thought from the heart of the story, which builds up as the pages are turned. The mystery linking everything together remains unseen till the end (I haven’t finished it yet but it hasn’t shown up), but every new clue results in an Ooh or Aaah. Murakami lets us add things up for ourselves, which only adds to the zest of reading the story.
A storyteller indeed.
Posted by: iffygrace on: December 29, 2007
These are some books that have caught my attention recently:
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins,the Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein, We Need to Talk about Kevin (sure-winner) by Lionel Shriver, Where Have All the Leaders Gone by Lee Iacocca at $44 (make no mistake, it’s expensive, far too expensive for me) and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’ve not read all except WNTTAK. That one’s GOOD.
I don’t really get the fuss about Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s got a provocative theme, sure, and maybe a little shocking, but I wasn’t really impressed after all the hype my friend created about it. If someone could point out to me what really struck him/her while reading it, I’d be most thankful.
Another movie I want to watch, although my friend said it wasn’t great: The Departed. Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, oh and Jack Nicholson who I remember vaguely from somewhere; it’ll either be very good or quite bad.
Posted by: iffygrace on: December 27, 2007
It’s sometimes hard to remember what you did in a day, although when you aren’t trying to remember it what you did gushes up all about in your head, in such a strong torrent of words and flows and rhythms that you begin to fear for your head. A person’s brain can only hold so many words. But now I try to type, and everything seems different. COuld it be because I try to be more careful with my words? Or because of the typos? Perhaps because I don’t seem to be able to type fast enough. The words race through my brain faster than I type, and it doens’t seem right when I slow down to correct a word here, retype a phrase there. Writing is different. Writing allows you to sift through the words in your mind till you find what you are looking for, yet at the same time, it is too slow.Such confusion over a single thing.
SO what do I say now? Today was an eventful day. I don’t mean that in the ordinary, humdrum manner in which most of the better part of the human population carries out its lives. Today I did more meaningful things than I have done in a day for many days. I woke up in the morning, all tired and bleary-eyed; I left the house and rode in my mother’s car still bleary-eyed and not a little too heatstroked (I realise that isn’t even a word, but nevermind that now); when I reached my grandma’s house I felt faint from the heat and carsickness. We watched two movies. I Am Legend, which was really good and National Treasure, which was really typical of a Big Roaring American Feel-Good Film. A Typical Blockbuster. One which was sure to garner lots of critics’ anti-rave reviews and a big bunch of box office cash. Stuff like that make me believe more and more in the Mob’s stupidity in eating everything from the hands of commerce. But I still watched it, even though I wouldn’t have wasted money on it if it had been just me, because my brother wanted to watch it.
I though Will Smith’s performance in I Am Legend was amazing. Not just amazing, but very very good. My favourite part *HUGE SPOILER ALERT* was when he dashed into the darkness after Sam (ever notice how people usually write “his dog Sam” instead of just “Sam”? Is it because we want to differentiate between animals/pets and humans, or just for reference’s sake, and so as not to confuse pets and people?) That part moved me more than I can say. The whole time he was in there I could smell the stench of fear with him, and dread pooled in my stomach the same way it must have with him, except for him it was all real. Have you every wondered, how much torture actors and actresses put themselves through every time they play out a character in distress? I mean the really good ones, who act it out so perfectly, so thoroughly, that you feel their emotions coursing through you the same time it goes through them, and not just because of the background atmospheric music trying to ham it up. Why would anyone put themselves through such pain, again and again, even if it’s for money? Acting is a passion for real, true actors, but how can such agony be worth it?
I wanted to write about how words flow through your head in all the wrong moments, especially when you can’t get it down on paper or in the computer. They just keep streaming in and out of your head, not stopping, and the more you try to stop up the river the faster it flows. Of course, many days you do succeed in damming the flood of words,but there’s always a lingering sense of having lost something. Your intellect? You feel it slipping away from you, bit by bit because you are plugging up the flow of your thoughts?
Why can’t we be like words? Words pass through intangibles, their only obstacle is the air and solids like buildings. Words leave lovers’ lips to reach lovers’ ears; words leave a father’s mouth to pass through a mother’s tummy, into an unborn child’s memory. If we could be words, what lengths we could go to to mean what we say! Words don’t have hidden meanings, unless the listener knows how to listen for them. Words are to the point, brisk, but also true and full of emotion. Words can be twisted to lie, but the words themselves never do. Am I being clear enough here? I hope it’s understandable. It’s just that words seem to flow out my head so easily at times, and when I try to capture the essence of them later, it all seems distorted, not quite the same. So I hope my ideas have been brought across discernibly.
In just a few years, a decade perhaps, the generation who lived through the first World War would no longer exist. The only material thing that would remain of them would be their bones six feet under, or their ashes if they were cremated. Isn’t it strange? To know a pile of ashes lying in an urn in a crematoriam belongs to a person? More correctly, is a person. What a strange world we live in. And yet still such an intriguing world, and so beautiful.
If only we all knew how to look at it through the right eyes.
But what are the right eyes?
Posted by: iffygrace on: September 7, 2007
I fear age. My reason’s quite vain, I must admit, but it’s not just superficial – growing older means you have lesser ability to do stuff you want to do. Like achieve your dreams.
My reasons are: not wanting to have my skin age, and get sagging jowls and a bigger waistline; not wanting to have less energy for things; not wanting to have less time to do everything I want to in this world; having to wear old-age reading glasses (it hurts to wear them and crane your neck to look at the computer screen, as my mum tells me); graduating from the most interesting experience of your life: high school/secondary school and junior college/pre-U, whatever you prefer to call it. Of course, there’s also the thing about losing touch with your friends, and not being as youthful as you once were – teenagers/preteens are always better looking, fresher, than old boring adults are. I’ll be quite devastate when I hit 25.
Give me the elixir of life, someone.
Next: death. which will, inevitably come after age. I’m not so much afraid of death as I am of losing someone to the great beyond. Well, of course, I do wonder what lies beyond, and it is quite troubling to think that after death you won’t even exist, much less realise you don’t exist. Being able to think about things, people like you are able to now and not even thinking after death – that’s not something I look forward to. If anything, I think this shows that the consciousness makes the person. If I remember correctly, this is the opposite of the great law of existentialism – that existing is meaning. Sorry, but I believe that essence provides more meaning than existing ever can. I don’t understand why those philosophers think that way – if existing is meaning shouldn’t they start considering animals as sentient? Which they obviously don’t, because I don’t believe any of them were ever vegetarians.
This afternoon, well, actually, yesterday afternoon, seeing as how it’s now 1.35am, I was thinking about the what ifs if my mum passed away. Awful thought! I couldn’t bear it – my mum is more than my security blanket; she comforts, she teaches, she advises, and she loves me unconditionally, just as I love her unconditionally. I know I’m starting to sound like a mummy’s girl, which I probably am, perhaps, if you go by the “being overly dependent or mooshy on your parents is immature/gross”. Well, I’m just stating facts; I do love my mother. Very much. But I feel bad about not being able to communicate all that affection to her – my family isn’t all that open about love, that is, my brother and I are very close to our mum, but we don’t go around proclaiming our love for her at the top of our voices. I know I should spend more time with her, but I really also want to do my stuff, and I feel torn apart knowing I should but not doing so because, well because I’m selfish and I don’t think I can last the rest of my life not doing stuff I like to spend time with my mum.
How do people juggle time with their parents and time for themselves? At the dinner table? I usually eat while doing something else, something that’s pretty exclusive – watching videos or reading or listening to stuff to better my language skills. I don’t want to keep feeling this kind of guilt. When I’m an adult and my mum has passed away (NO!) I don’t want to regret not doing something with her, I want to remember my time with her and feel contented.
No matter how close you are to a person, there will come a day when you never meet that person again, and worst of all, you may not even realise on your last meeting that you’ll never see him/her again.
People relations are the toughest to understand and the most heartbreaking, yet we all live our lives every day not even realising what’s slipping through our fingers.
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